


past, present, future, you and I

by scribblscrabbl



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Future Fic, M/M, Post-Inception
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 01:51:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3632154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The easiest way to get to Eames would be a nonstop flight to Montreal and then a two and a half hour drive down to the lake. </p><p>But nothing about them has ever been easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	past, present, future, you and I

**Author's Note:**

> I plotted this thing while running on the treadmill. No joke.

_Hi there, if you’ve gotten this far, then you know who I am. Kindly leave your threatening message at the—beeeeep_.

“I’ve thought long and hard. Really long, I know, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s been a long time coming, just the way you said, I just couldn’t—I want us to—what I mean is—fuck. Just, whatever you do, _stay put_.”

*

He pulls the shoebox out from under the bed and digs through all the IDs to get to the one he knows is at the bottom. He’d used it only up until his twenty-first birthday so it’s still like new, with a picture of a boy staring up at him he wouldn’t recognize if it weren’t for the stupid dimples. He was quick to smile back then, quick to laugh, and quick to love, but he figures that’s how things were at eighteen in a quiet town and a quiet life. Twenty one was when all that got away from him. Or, when he’d thought he wanted nothing to do with it. He’d discovered how to _dream bigger_.

He tucks the driver’s license—still valid for fifteen more years—into his wallet, then slips that into the back pocket of his jeans, worn at the knees, frayed at the hems. When he walks down the stairs, he stops at the mirror in the foyer to look at his reflection. He’d pulled on an old Fleetwood Mac t-shirt and ran his fingers through his damp hair by way of styling it. It’s loose, curly, untamed, and it makes him look about eight years younger. About the time he’d met Eames. 

(They accidentally swapped carry-ons going through security at Heathrow—brown leather bags with tonal topstitching. That was where their similarities began and where they ended. Turned out they were on the same flight, heading to the same city to pull the same job. 

_Serendipity_ , Eames would call it from then on.)

*

The easiest way to get to Eames would be a nonstop flight to Montreal and then a two and a half hour drive down to the lake. 

But nothing about them has ever been easy. So Arthur embarks on a thirty-six hour road trip, which’ll probably push forty after factoring in traffic, pit stops, and the low mpg of his ‘98 Nissan Sentra.

The thing is, he needs the hours, because for all his certainty, he still hasn’t figured out what he’ll say, what he’s supposed to say, even though there’s no such thing as _supposed to_ with the kind of lives they’re used to leading. He thinks forty hours have to be enough for something eloquent and prolonged to coalesce in his left brain so he can start making up for all the times Eames said every damn thing so beautifully and he said nothing at all.

He stows the GPS in the glove compartment just in case; he already has the map in his head, sees the bold, curved line from A to B, a few finger-lengths long. 

He doesn’t bring much else. A leather jacket, a toolbox, a wad of cash, and his Glock, tucked against the small of his back, for peace of mind if nothing else. He doesn’t anticipate anyone looking for Arthur Rosenfeld, small-town boy who donates blood, pays his taxes on time, and never thinks seriously about crossing state lines.

It’s not cathartic like people say it is, returning to your roots, digging past all the dirt you used to bury them good and deep. Then again, Arthur never rejected what he was born into; it was just the luck of the draw that he stumbled on something irresistibly more extraordinary, and then found out he had more guts than he gave himself credit for.

He took the last few months to scrub off some of that _extra_ , as much as he could after wearing it and breathing it and drowning in it for so long. He thinks if he’s gonna do this right, then it can’t be any other way.

*

He’s already crossed over to New Mexico when he remembers there’s one more thing he brought. He never really intended to listen to it, he just couldn’t leave it behind, but he reaches over to the glove compartment and digs it out, weighing it in his palm like a loaded die. 

He stares out across the desert, at the indiscriminate sprawl of earth split by jagged peaks and dotted with clumps of untamed flora. It used to calm him, slow him down. Now he just wants to gun his engine and make it all streak by until it blurs so he feels like he’s _getting_ somewhere. 

He feels jittery, impatient, thinking maybe he was better off flying, he’s such a fucking idiot, so he sticks in the CD.

_Just checked in at the hotel in Póvoa de Varzim. I can scarcely fathom why you passed this up for Brussels. Hot sand and glittering water for pissing statues, I’ve no idea what goes on in that head of yours sometimes. Finnigan’s more of a prick than I remember so you would’ve had the best of both worlds. See what I did there? Give Mal my best and remind Cobb he owes me double now for the stunt he pulled in Rio. I’ll be sunbathing and thinking of you, darling._

*

The thing about taking the straightest path across the United States is that there’s fuck all along the way, just goddamn _land_ in every direction, which starts to suit Arthur just fine, mostly because he stops paying attention.

_So I seem to be in a hospital. More of a makeshift clinic, really. Someone searched me in a hurry but didn’t take my mobile, thank god for second-class criminals. I may have contracted some sort of infectious disease from the used needle in my arm but all my limbs and vital organs are accounted for, just in case you’re worrying, darling. Should be able to finagle my way out of this mess, preferably after cutting off Kuhn’s balls for his double-cross, but stand by, if you would, just in case._

He has close to six years’ worth of messages, transferred from over forty burner phones. His computer fucked up the timeline but it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t need a linear narrative. Every message is self-contained, its own little book that starts and ends with Eames.

(He doesn’t analyze why he’s saved them all, but if he did, his conclusion would be this: that they’re mementos from a remarkable life he always figured would burn out, because anything so violent and dazzling always does.)

*

The weather cooperates until Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, it hails.

It’s nothing like the storm they watched from a clock tower in Mainz two years ago so he keeps driving, keeps pushing seventy until the hailstones grow in size, from dimes to marbles, and then to golf balls. 

He hears the windshield crack before he sees it—a spider web the width of his palm on the passenger’s side.

“Shit.” He pulls over to the shoulder and flings the door open, running to the trunk to pull out the tarp to drape over the car before ducking back in, exposed skin smarting.

A storm like this will last ten, fifteen minutes tops. He drums his fingers against his thigh and knocks his knee against the steering wheel for one of those minutes before he starts the engine again because, fuck it, he’ll still have enough gas to get him to Oklahoma City.

_It’s three in the morning in Tokyo. I haven’t got a drop of liquor in me, cross my heart. Couldn’t sleep, you know how my body rejects the very idea of time zones. You think I’d be used to it by now, living the glamorous jet-setter life of an international supercriminal._

Arthur tips his head back and closes his eyes as Eames continues with the fierce thud of the storm as his accompaniment.

_The replacement Akerloff found to run point is a brainless twit. All right, that might be a tad harsh. It’s your fault, you know. You with your bottomless stores of information and terrifying resourcefulness setting the bar impossibly high. Even this magnificent forty-first-storey view is little consolation. Truth is, darling, you’ve ruined me for anyone else._

*

Twenty-five miles outside Springfield, he stops by a diner on the side of the road and gets a short stack and coffee for $4.99. He thinks they’re the best pancakes he’s ever had, or maybe it’s just the air out here, and the people, friendly without wanting anything in return. Out of all the layers he’s built up over the years, it’s the cynicism that feels the dirtiest, and the most resilient.

He feels a tap on his shoulder when he’s unlocking his car.

“Excuse me, I’m so sorry to bother you but my car battery just up and died on me. You wouldn’t happen to have booster cables, would you?”

He turns to see a petite woman, early-thirties, with a small mouth, bright eyes, and a colorful scarf around her neck. She makes him think of Ariadne, a tanner, Southern version, Tennessean by the sound of her accent.

“Yea, I do. I can give you a hand.” 

She beams at him and it makes him think he could be good at this, at starting over.

When he reparks and gets out the cables, he sees two kids in the back of her car, one boy studiously reading a book and the other making faces against the window, hands and mouth smeared with chocolate.

“That one looks like a handful,” he says, giving a nod of his head as he pops open the hoods.

She laughs, as loudly and freely as Ariadne laughed when they first met. “He’s got more spunk, that’s for sure, but he can be a little angel when he wants to be. You have any?”

He stills in the middle of attaching the clamps.

“Sorry, you don’t have to answer that. I can be so nosy sometimes.”

“No, it’s fine—it’s just complicated.” He steps back and runs a hand through his hair, staring at the guts of her car. “I love kids. I used to think I wanted them. I guess—no, I still do. There’s just things—a lot of things I need to work out before then.”

“I’m guessing that’s why you’re in the middle of nowhere Missouri, alone, eating at this old dump.” She smiles impishly, eyes twinkling, and he can’t help smiling back.

“Yea, and probably making it harder than it should be.”

She just shrugs, a lazy but elegant rise and fall. “If the things we really want in life came easy, I suspect we wouldn’t want ‘em half as bad.”

When they get her car running and he’s about to pull out of his space, he hears a tap on his window.

“I’m Marianne, by the way,” she says when he cranks it down.

“Arthur,” he replies without hesitation, reaching through the gap to shake her hand.

“Arthur. I’ve always liked that name.”

*

 _Arthur. Arthur, I’m—in a spot of trouble—ah,_ fuck _, bloody shitting hell—not going to tell you where I am because I know you’ll come after me, you’re far more self-sacrificing than you dare to admit. I—just need to say something—I’d hoped we’d be face-to-face, sitting on the sofa or in a nice park like normal, civilized people, but I guess it was a daft thing to hope for anyway. I need to say—_ shit _—sorry, that wasn’t it, hold on a second—_

Arthur tightens his hands around the wheel and stares straight ahead, visibility down to a couple hundred feet in the dark and the steady downpour that’s drenched Route 70 since St. Louis. It makes him feel claustrophobic, suffocated, like the longer he drives, the smaller his world gets, until it’s nothing but the stretch of road illuminated by his headlights. 

He passes the occasional car or two—out here, no one’s in a hurry—but mostly he’s alone and the solitude makes him a little crazy, crazy enough to think about talking back to the Eames coming out of his stereo.

_I took the job, just so you know. I heard about Cobol. Cobb’s lucky he’s still on your good side, I was sorely tempted to collect that price on his head. It’s a big one. Would’ve supported my lavish lifestyle for months. But that’s not how I want it to go, despite what you might think. I want to make sure he doesn’t get you killed, and then I want to personally take him to his children so you can see he doesn’t need you anymore. The rest, darling, will be up to you._

“And then I walked away. I walked away because I was so fucking— _furious_ at you, for acting like you knew what was best for me, and so—” Arthur breathes, “so goddamn terrified I almost landed us in limbo, that I—no, that Cobb, Cobb walked us into a death trap.”

After three years, he’s learning to reapportion the blame.

“No, you know what the truth is? The truth is,”—he’s learning that, too—“I was terrified to find that even after a year and a half of radio silence I was still so fucking in—“

Then he hears one of his tires explode, and he starts swerving, nearly hydroplanes off the road before he manages to screech to a stop.

“Jesus Christ.”

He just sits there for a second, letting his heart slow a little, before he cuts the engine and gets out. Changing a flat tire is easy until it’s pitch black out and pouring rain. Then it’s a fucking pain in the ass.

He’s walking towards the trunk, wondering what it is about Eames that makes him so unreasonable about every goddamn thing, when he slips. He slips, and he falls, landing hard enough on his back that it stuns him a little.

And then he just gives up. He stays on the ground and just closes his eyes, asphalt slick and rough under his palms. He licks his lips, feeling the rain sluice down his face, neck, forearms, and imagines it washing off that last layer of a burned out life.

*

At thirty-five he already feels like he’s past his prime. The deltoid he tore years go in Minsk still makes his shoulder twinge when he pulls on a jacket. His left knee has never been the same since Malakar shattered it, for five thousand upfront. (He took back that five thousand two months later, along with another five because Eames was known to make good on his threats.) His nastiest scar is the one that bisects his calf, wide and jagged. Eames likes to say it makes him look terrible in swim shorts.

If he wants, he can map out the last fifteen years with his skin and bones, connect the dots to make a chaotic web of the places he chose to see and the places he doesn’t care to ever see again. And if he did, there would be one luminous thread in the middle of it all that he’d keep disentangled from the rest, wrapped tightly around his finger so he could remind himself how he wants his next fifteen years to go.

*

He stops for gas outside Dayton, leaning against the car to watch daylight stir along the horizon, breathing light into the atmosphere and making him feel everything with a little more conviction. His purpose started to flag around 3 am, not from exhaustion but from those insidious, creeping fears that always come out in the dead of night to gnaw at a person’s soft underbelly. He feels them scattering now, scurrying to darker corners, and when he finishes refueling, he just sits in his car for a minute with his forehead against the steering wheel, getting his second wind.

Damn it _, Arthur, just tell me where you are. I know Cobb didn’t do it. He might be mad, he’s certainly made some poor life choices, but, Christ, I know he’d never murder the bloody love of his life. We’ll figure it out, all right? I’ve got some contacts in Mombasa, they can get him to disappear for a while, yea? It’s me, darling, you don’t have to run away from me. Arthur—fuck. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._

There’s a tap against his window. When he looks up, he’s staring down the barrel of a gun.

It’s a kid, no older than eighteen, shifty, pale-faced, motioning nervously for him to get out of the car. He’s wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, a bomber jacket two sizes too big like that’ll make him look tough. Instead, he just looks stupid and young, and lost.

Arthur holds up his hands in surrender before slowly pushing the door open and climbing out. Then he knocks the gun out of the kid’s loose grip before he can blink and pushes him face down against the door, one hand around his neck, the other twisting an arm across his back, just hard enough to make him yelp.

(It didn’t take him long to learn the trade, how to get in, get out, run fast and aim well. The thought never even crossed his mind—that he could snap a guy’s arm in half, base jump off a thirty-storey building, survive a high-speed car chase, or crash-land a helicopter. It made him think maybe he had it in him all along, and even then he still felt like an imposter. Because he’d spent twenty years of his life in a quiet town living a quiet life without wanting much else, but Eames—Eames had always been extraordinary.)

“Look, kid, I don’t know what your deal is but this isn’t a road you wanna go down, all right? Go back to school, find a job, do something useful, something _better_ with your life before you run out of second chances.”

Then Arthur lets him go and picks the gun off the ground. Someone had done a half-ass job scratching off the serial number. He throws it onto the passenger seat, then drives off without a second glance.

*

With less than five hundred miles and seven hours to go, he makes one more stop.

He turns off the interstate and takes a small, well-worn road down to Lake Erie, then parks right by the bluffs. The weather is perfect, the sky high and immaculate, streaked with cirrus clouds.

_You know I’ve wondered, hundreds of times, what it would be like to get stuck in limbo. I know Cobb’s been down there but I can’t bring myself to ask him. Stranded in a dream for so long you forget you’re dreaming. It’s one of those terrible endings you always think can happen to other people but not to you. But we’ve come close, haven’t we—more than once. Luckily, darling, I decided a long time ago that if I had to live out my days shipwrecked on the shores of anyone’s subconscious, it would be yours._

Arthur walks out to the rock’s edge and looks out over the water. From this vantage point it’s easy to pretend it’s the ocean, wrapping around the world for miles on end.

For the first twenty years of his life he never once saw the ocean. When he finally did, on the Pacific coast while making his way from Portland to San Francisco, he stared and breathed and trembled, and for two hours he couldn’t walk away. He wasn’t with Eames the first time, but he imagines Eames would’ve understood without a word, let him stay forever if he wanted. And that’s the thing about Eames he didn’t recognize for a long time but _felt_ all the same. Eames is good with people, better than most, but he’s not a magician. He didn’t have Arthur all figured out from day one, or week one, or year one; he still doesn’t. But with Arthur, and only with Arthur, he picks out the most beautiful and quiet and heartbreaking things to know and knows every damn one of them _well_. Which is how Arthur feels, down to his bones, that no matter the worst case scenario—stuck in a flaming wreck, dropped into the ocean, stranded in limbo—they, together, would do just fine.

*

He turns off the radio when the lakehouse comes into view. 

Eames bought the place two years ago saying he’s always wanted one. Which is bullshit because it’s a lakehouse in the middle of fucking nowhere New York, and if he knows anything about Eames, he knows that Eames can do nature and wilderness for about two hours before he starts missing paved streets and traffic jams and _crowds_. But Arthur loves lakehouses, almost as much as he loves the ocean.

He pulls into the drive and stares at the entrance for a moment, at the terracotta-colored brick, the twenty-foot-high ceilings showing through the expansive windows, and the crocuses lining the walkway that Eames imported from some island in the Aegean.

The front door opens as he’s getting out of the car.

“You drove all the way across the bloody United States, didn’t you.” Eames is trying his damndest to frown, which doesn’t do anything to distract Arthur from the lumberjack shirt he’s wearing, probably thinking it’s what people do when they live in the rugged outdoors. “What happened to your windshield? Christ, was someone _shooting_ at you?”

Arthur doesn’t say anything. He just walks decisively up to Eames, curls a hand around his nape, and kisses him hard, making their teeth clack together a little. Kisses him and tastes him, and loses his breath because the last few months have been long and bare, necessary but lonely all the same. Finally getting to Eames, _having_ him, lets Arthur finish that sharp, bold line he’s been drawing the last forty hours that cuts off then from now as Eames’s heat and sounds and sighs fill in the rest.

When he pulls away Eames opens his mouth—because he never knows when to shut up—and Arthur just clamps one hand over it, fingertips pressing into his cheek.

“These forty hours have helped me come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be able to say anything prolonged and eloquent. Anything even half as well as you do, which is one of many things that make me convinced you’ll be impossible to live with. But I’m gonna try anyway because I’ve never half-assed anything in my life.” He feels Eames’s lips trying to move against his palm and glares, pushing down a little harder. “I look back on the last fifteen years and I’m not sure I’m happy with the person I’ve become. I don’t hate him, but I catch myself thinking about counterfactuals a lot. What if I’d stayed in Tucson, finished college, got a normal job, so that every time I talked to my parents, I could tell them everything and it’d be the goddamn truth. I would’ve been happy, I think. Completely fucking ordinary, but happy. But the one thing that makes me forget all that, the one thing that makes me happy _now_ , even on days when I can’t look at myself in the mirror, is you. I wouldn’t trade you in for all the second chances in the world. And I feel so—so fucking lucky that we both took that job in Calcutta, that we’ve kept each other alive, that you stuck around long enough so I could figure this out, even when you had every reason to walk away. I don’t hate the person I’ve become, but I tend to like myself more when I’m with you.”

Then he pulls his hand away.

Eames is smiling now, smiling like Arthur’s just said the most prolonged and eloquent thing he’s ever heard.

“You look different,” he says, carding his fingers through Arthur’s hair, rubbing a little at his scalp.

“My potential future self. I’m trying him out for size,” Arthur says, suddenly nervous because it’s not just the hair and the clothes, it’s the skin, the roots he’s been nourishing since Eames saw him last. “What do you think?”

Eames looks, really _looks_ at him, making Arthur feel like he gets it, he always knew, before saying, “I think, darling, that you look like the rest of my life.”

**Author's Note:**

> [My Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com).


End file.
